Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: gratuitous space battles

DIE you heathen alien scum!

Posted on February 26, 2010

Ok so here we go, It’s finally ready for release. Hopefully all will go smoothly! Here is the new DLC for GSB:

THE ORDER are a group of aliens who take their beliefs very seriously. Their holy book may have been written when The Order had spears and lived in mud huts, but they cling to the letter of the book even now, ten thousand years later. And you no what isn’t in the holy book? That’s right… YOU.

And the order interpret this the way every rational life-form would. That you are heathen aliens who must be destroyed in the name of ‘The One True God’.  They tried Hymns, then they tried leaflets, but now they are trying nuclear missiles, radiation guns and limpet mines. Stand aside heathen alien scum.

Details here

Video here:


The order have three new weapons. Radiation guns, firing radioactive bullets which infect your ship and do damage long after the impact (cue nice green glowy effect), Nuclear Missiles, which are a similar effect in missile form, and limpet mines, which are like remote controlled drones which stick to enemy fighters and drag them, down to speeds where anyone can hit them. They also have faster firing cruiser rockets called ‘firefly’ rockets. In terms of ship bonuses’ they are big on power, low on speed.

I hope you enjoy them. BTW, One of the new scenarios is a survival mode map. I know you enjoy them :D

Spot The New Feature

Posted on February 23, 2010

It’s very minor. But what have I changed in this screenshot below?

I’m supposed to be finalizing the new expansion. I’ll do more work on that tomorrow, but I’ve resigned myself to one more patch before I release it. I needed more weapon variety for them, and that meant code changes to the main game. Then I suddenly got a bit manic and obsessed about improving the graphics in all ways. Hence, 2 days were wasted trying to add shadows (I tried various methods but none of them look right, not without re-rendering every existing ship and a major re-write) and then a decent bloom effect. In the end, I junked all that code, because it didn’t get me anywhere.  I’ve made 3 tiny changes today to some stuff which make the game look very slightly better. Overall, it all adds up methinks….

Gratuitous Patch Number 32!

Posted on February 16, 2010

At last I’ve released patch 32 (version 1.32) for GSB today. If all goes well, then I’ll roll that out to partners like steam over the next two days. There are many changes big and small. Here are the big ones:

1) Performance: UI performance improvement for scrolling on the challenge browser screen.
2) Performance: Differential challenge data downloading means that refreshing the challenge list is much faster now.
3) New Feature: Fleet overlay UI for the battle screen showing every ship on your fleet and it’s current status.
4) Usability: Mouse cursor now changes to the hand icon when over something clickable.
5) New Feature: Added module stat comparison window when you click any item of module data.
6) Bug Fix: Weapons will now fire at anything within range correctly, even if ordered not to attack a certain class, providing that no other suitable targets are in range.

Depending how you play the game, some of these may be irrelevant, or awesome. I really like the module stat comparison stuff. I should have done it ages ago, and the fleet overlay is handy too. People who micromanage their weapons orders to the nth degree will appreciate number 6. I always thought it was working that way, but it turns out my code is buggier than a bug breeding colony on bug island. It works in a much more sensible way now, and its more viable to build ships that mix and match anti-fighter and anti-cruiser weapons :D

The patch will auto-download over the next 24 hours for existing buyers. New buyers get a  ready-patched copy anyway.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. I forgot to mention in the readme that I beefed up some of the explosions and particle effects too. The very next thing I do will be the next expansion pack, which I’m pretty excited about. After that, it’s likely the mini-campaign.

Two new features for GSB

Posted on February 12, 2010

I was honestly trying to work on new DLC, but hey, I ended up adding and improving some stuff. One thing I ended up doing was mouse cursor changes, so it actually changes to the windows pointy finger thing now to show you that you can click something, which is quite nifty. I also added two features.

The first feature is the ‘fleet overlay’ at the left of the screen. It’s a scrollable column of icons for every ship in the fleet. The tooltips show your current damage percentage, and they fill red as the ships take damage. you can also click them to zoom to that ship. It’s a handy way to see at a glance in big battles which ships are taking hits. I also added a tiny arrow icon to toggle that new feature on or off, in case some people don’t like it. I have a tiny UV bleeding issue on that button I must fix…

gratuitous space battles fleet overlay UI

The second feature is rather cool for statistics-freaks. If you have played much GSB, and spent much time on the ship design screen, you will know the frustration of seeing “weight=122” and not really knowing how that compares to anything else. Obviously you can go through each module of the same ship class and compare, but wouldn’t it be better if the game makes that trivial to do?
Tada! It does. You can click any of those data entries at the bottom left now, and get a comparison window, ready sorted and scrolled to show where the current module fits in. I hope people find this useful.

gratuitous space battles ship design screen

Now I can get back to work designing fleets for the religious aliens in the next DLC…

Both these spangly new things will be in version 1.32, which will get released shortly before the new DLC. Yay!

Programming Gratuitous Rocket Trails

Posted on February 9, 2010

I was watching District 9 ( I liked it, except the more yucky violent bits), and there were some cool rapid rocket trail effects in it, and it suddenly reminded me that the rocket trails in Gratuitous Space Battles aren’t good enough at high speed. Take a look at this rocket trial, from a rocket cruiser missile at 4x speed:

Crap isn’t it :D. At normal speed it’s fine, but at super high speed, the missile actually moves too fast per frame of rendering for me to actually space out the particles. So I just knocked up some code that instead of doing this: (pseudocode)

HowFarHaveWeTravelled?
IsItTimeForAnotherParticle?
IfSoPlaceAParticleHere

does this:

for(distance_accounted_for = 0; distance_accounted_for < actual distance, distance += particle spacing)
{
  Position = LastMissilePosition
  Position += (distance_accounted for)
  Place a particle at Position;
}

Which is more work :D But it’s worth it, because even at 4x speed it now looks like this:

I know it’s a bit late to be worrying about all this months after the game came out and got reviews, but I am just completely drawn towards tweaking the game to look better. Also this means I can experiment with superfast rocket trails which will still look good. Also today I’ve done all of the debris and turret gfx for the new race in the new DLC/expansion pack thing. Now I have to actually design their ship configurations, and allocate their bonuses. Then I need to do their mission deployments, and then it’s pretty much done (and I then need to balance and playtest it). Yay!